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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap.. Copyright No. 

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UN5TED STATES OF AMERICA. 



<Ufte»(Ueacning 

♦ ♦ of ♦ (©ftn^t ♦ ♦ 
(Concerning ♦ tne 

♦ iJufure ♦ l§>ife ♦ 



Rev. C. H. PENDLETON 



AMERICAN 

BAPTIST PUBLICATION 

SOCIETY 



THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 



'. C. H.TEl 



REV. C. H. "PENDLETON 




PHILADELPHIA 

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY 
1420 Chestnut Street 



>v.\ 






Copyright 1896 by the 
American Baptist Publication Society 



LC Control Number 




tm P 96 027581 



NOTE 



This pamphlet, substantially as it stands, was de- 
livered at a New England Ministers* Conference. Its 
publication was asked for ; and in its present form 
and wider circulation it is earnestly hoped that it may 
be productive of good. 



THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 



IT is the purpose of this paper to discuss the life 
to come in the light of Christ's teaching : I 
shall contend that Christ is the sole authority here, 
and what he says must limit our knowledge of the 
other life ; that human opinions are, after all, noth- 
ing more than opinions, and cannot add to or sub- 
tract from that which Christ has revealed. For the 
purposes of this discussion it will be necessary to 
consider : 

Had any teacher less Godlike 
i. The Ultimate Au- and j ess aut horitative than Jesus 
thority of Christ s -,.. . . . ,, 

Disclosures Chnst S lven expression to the 

sayings he uttered, as recorded in 
the Gospels, long ago the world would have banished 
him in scorn. The fact that now for nearly two thou- 
sand years Christ has held the loftiest place as the 
unapproached leader of the race, the fact that his 
sayings have been received by men who count most 
in the world as the highest and the ultimate author- 
ity in ethics, the fact that the holiest hope and the 
dearest longings of a life to come after this are as- 
sured in him — become an indubitable evidence that 

5 



6 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

his authority is held to be nothing less than divinely 
absolute. And this fact was never more apparent 
than to-day, when the cry of spiritually bewildered 
men is, " Back to Christ." Christ himself is the 
court of final appeal — not what his followers say, 
but what he says, is felt to be final and absolute 
truth. 

In an address to the electors at Bristol, Edmund 
Burke said : " Gentlemen, neither your vain wishes 
nor mine can change the nature of things." Human 
opinions do not change the nature of things. The 
generations down, men have had their opinions of 
the nature of this world, the sun, moon, and stars, 
but their opinions have not changed a hair's breadth 
the parallax of a single star. If ethics grounds it- 
self in the unalterable nature of God, and if Jesus 
Christ is the disclosure of the ultimate law of 
humanity, then what he says is as changeless and 
inexorable as God. Christ claims to speak with the 
absolute authority of God. He claims that the im- 
press of the Almighty was immediate upon him. 
He declares, "I speak not from myself, but the 
Father which sent me, he hath given me com- 
mandment what I should say. . . Even as the 
Father hath said unto me, so I speak." Again, 
he so identifies himself with the Father as to make 
this astonishing statement : " He that hateth me 
hateth my Father also. If I had not done among 
them the works which none other did, they had 
not had sin ; but now have they both seen and 
hated both me and my Father." If that does not 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 7 

express moral and spiritual identity, I do not know 
where you will find it. 

But it may be objected that the texts are from 
the fourth Gospel, which some say is so mystical 
and transcendental, so pervaded by the hazy at- 
mosphere of neoplatonism, as to be untrustworthy, 
because it gives a Christ whose countenance is 
blurred and whose voice is oblique. But come with 
me and let us in imagination become a part of that 
audience which assembled around the sunlit knoll 
whereon he sat and taught ; there we shall see and 
hear him in an atmosphere which is generally con- 
sidered to be pellucid, and where all will say that 
he is heard and seen as he is. No mirage of over- 
wrought fancy lifts the man into the greatness of 
Deity, and no echoes of transcendental philosophy 
magnify his voice and distort his sayings. That 
mount whereon he sat and taught, among the great 
heights of the earth swells scarcely to a dignity 
greater than a grassy hillock ; but what he taught 
there has lifted it above the sea of moral darkness 
until it towers aloft, the sublimest moral height in 
human history. Over it the very heavens draw 
kindly near, and as the evening shadows deepen 
over the fields of amaryllis, the stars stoop from 
their thrones in cold space, grow friendly, and speak 
in answering love. 

But the heavens are less deep in mysterious 
beauty than the Divine Man who opens his mouth 
to speak the words that lift this swelling knoll to 
the highest throne of ethics. As we stand there 



8 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

with that peasant multitude and press the actual 
grass of that slope under our feet, as we feel the 
balmy breath of the autumn evening on which the 
divine Teacher's sayings come to our ears, we be- 
come conscious of the mysterious greatness of the 
hour ; "the fowls of the air," the golden-throated 
lilies of the field "that toil not," become articulate 
and speak of the nearness of Him who made them 
and us. We know we are before One who stands 
alone the Son of God, and near to him, whose spirit 
and teaching rise above all earthly teachings, as 
the snowy peak of Lebanon, away yonder to the 
north, golden-tipped by the setting sun, towers 
above all the dark world below. We feel that the 
Heavenly Father of whom he is speaking, is more 
real and nearer than the earthly father now stand- 
ing perhaps at our side. We shall have time to 
catch his living tones in a part only of his aston- 
ishing sayings. Listen, he is speaking : "Ask, and 
it shall be given you ; seek, and ye shall find ; 
knock, and it shall be opened unto you : for every 
one that asketh, receiveth, and he that seeketh 
findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be 
opened." He is speaking of his Father and of his 
willingness to respond to the wants of his needy 
children. Listen again. He is speaking to our 
human experiences in substantiation of what he 
has just said : " What man of you, who, if his son 
shall ask him a loaf, will give him a stone ; or, if 
he shall ask a fish, will give him a serpent ? " Not 
one of us would do that. Listen, he is speaking to 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 9 

our answering convictions : " If ye then, being evil, 
know how to give good gifts to your children, how 
much more shall your Heavenly Father give good 
gifts to them that ask him ? " That must be so, 
or God is not God. Is it not indeed wonderful ? 
Is it surprising that we are astonished at his teach- 
ing ? Why, there is such ringing sincerity, such 
positiveness as of absolute knowledge, such sim- 
plicity as of indubitable truth, and withal such com- 
manding authority, we cannot doubt. We almost 
hear the Father himself speak. 

But listen again : " Enter ye in by the narrow 
gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that 
leadeth to destruction. Not every one that saith 
unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom 
of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father. 
Many will say unto me in that day, Lord, Lord, did 
we not prophesy by thy name, and by thy name 
cast out devils, and by thy name do many mighty 
works? Then will I profess unto them, I never 
knew you, depart from me, ye that work iniquity. 
Every one, therefore, which heareth these words of 
mine, and doeth them, shall be likened unto a wise 
man that built his house upon the rock." What 
can that mean other than that he has spoken the 
truth, which is the very bed-rock of all moral truth, 
the constitutive ethics of the being of God and of 
humanity ? 

There is no more uncertainty about the truth 
Christ speaks than there is about the rising and 
the setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, and 



10 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

the tides of the sea. His sayings express the im- 
mutable moral nature of things, which no vain 
wishes and no speculative opinions can change. 
"The words that I have spoken unto you, the same 
shall judge men in the last day" — just as the vio- 
lated laws of bodily health judge ; just as the man 
who goes counter to the physical constitution of 
things is judged by that. 

One truth stands out so luminously clear in the 
Gospels as to be axiomatic ; what Christ says has 
the sanction of the Author of all truth. What he 
says in one place cannot be more true than what he 
says in another place, since he is Truth. What he 
says, therefore, carries the changelessness of om- 
nipotence. No human theories or vain wishes can 
change his word. He himself declares : " Heaven 
and earth may pass away, but my words shall not 
pass away." In an uncompromising sentence 
Bishop Butler says : " Things are what they are, 
and the consequences of them will be what they 
will be. Why, then, should we desire to be de- 
ceived ? " 

In this confused mortal life, the air of which 
throbs with the hubbub of conflicting opinions, 
where men are plunging forward through the murk 
somewhither, to meet some destiny, let us bow 
down our ears in reverence and holy fear, that we 
may hear the voice of Him who speaks the unalter- 
able truth. 

Men, who have believed at all that there was an- 
other life, have held that in some way this life was 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE II 

probationary. Certainly no morally sincere man 
wants to be deceived here. No one can be so fool- 
hardy as to wish to take his leap into the unseen 
upon the opinions of man or any school of men, 
which, after all, cannot be other than a conjecture. 
When we go hence, if there is one who can tell us 
aught certainly about that mist-clad land, whether 
there is "a house not made with hands eternal in 
the heavens" awaiting us there, and whether the 
change death works so fastens character and so 
fastens destiny that the soul living in any realm 
must bear forever, deep in its nature and its fortunes, 
the marks and consequences of its moral choices 
here, — it seems to me the highest reason and the 
highest courage to give him an attentive hearing. 
Then consider : 

In what I shall say here I wish 
2. What Christ defi- to ac j V ance no theories or specu- 

nttely reveals of the .... , . 

life beyond lations based upon my own vain 

wishes. All we know and all 
we can know is what Christ has revealed ; all 
other is mere speculation. I know of no later in- 
telligence than is given in the New Testament. 
The whole argument rests upon the Gospels as 
an authentic and authoritative record. To ques- 
tion the integrity of the Gospels is a virtual admis- 
sion that the writers of the New Testament have 
given, either wittingly, or unwittingly, an erroneous 
version of Christ's teachings. If they did so wit- 
tingly, they were dishonest ; if unwittingly, they 
were stupid. Unless we are prepared to deny to 



12 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

the evangelists common honesty and intelligence, 
we must admit that what Christ taught is final and 
unalterable. 

John Stuart Mill, beneath whose cold intellect 
there beat as clear, calm a judgment and logical in- 
sight as the present century has produced, exclaims: 
" And whatever else may be taken away from us by 
rational criticism, Christ is still left ; a unique figure, 
not more unlike his precursors than all his followers, 
even those who had the direct benefit of his per- 
sonal teachings. It is to no purpose for one to say 
that Christ, as exhibited in the Gospels, is not 
historical, and that we know not how much of what 
is admirable has been superadded by the tradition 
of his followers. The answer is, who among his 
disciples, or among his proselytes, was capable of 
inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imag- 
ining the life and character revealed in the Gos- 
pels ? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee ; as 
certainly not St. Paul, whose character and idiosyn- 
crasies were of a totally different sort" Back of 
the Gospels there is nothing to which we can go. 
The Gospels themselves are the medium in which 
Christ stands luminous. They are his garment — 
his alone — unapproached and matchless and in- 
separable from him. Human genius has nowhere 
produced anything that can be placed in the same 
category with the Gospels : they are alone in the 
realm of literature, because they have represented 
"God manifest in the flesh" — a representation 
transcending human art. 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 1 3 

Christ claimed that he came from God to bring 
certain tidings from a realm that lies beyond all 
human ken, and where human opinions do not 
reach. These things are as they are, and vain 
human wishes cannot change them. With that 
world which is the abode of his Father and an in- 
numerable host of angels, where he dwelt before 
Abraham was or ever the earth had foundation, 
Christ, while on earth, was in close and constant 
communion. The heavenly places were most real 
to him and always within reach of his voice. At 
his call that heavenly world responded. 

While this world of holy happiness and endless 
light was perfectly familiar to him, he tells of an- 
other world of penal woe and outer darkness, from 
which it was his mission to save men. He disclosed 
two invisible worlds that impinge upon this life 
from opposite directions, and into one or the other 
all the paths of human life turn to find the goal of 
a self-chosen destiny. He knew the valley of the 
shadow, all its secrets, and twilight windings. It 
was a realm in which his will was sovereign. He 
threw his voice across the chasm. It went uner- 
ringly to the invisible heights or depths and sum- 
moned the departed soul to retrace its steps, to ani- 
mate again the cold clay it had forsaken. Speaking 
to the Sadducees, the materialists of that time, he 
declared that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had an 
existence altogether apart from the mouldering dust 
in the tomb at Hebron. 

On the mount of the Transfiguration he conversed 



14 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

with Moses and Elijah, who had been residents of 
the other world, the one for nine, and the other 
for fifteen centuries. And yet they had not gone 
so far, nor grown so decrepit with age, as to lose 
interest in their kind or become indifferent to the 
human cries that vibrate upon this mortal air. 
Christ certainly taught that beyond this life there 
are two realms of deathless existence. Consider : 
Death sets its seal on a man's 
3. He declares that spiritual condition. It utters the 

character deter- J , , 1 T ., . , , , 

mines destiny final WOrd « Here rt 1S that Vam 

human wishes strive to change the 
nature of things, and, taking counsel of feelings 
rather than of the word of Christ, men have gone far 
afield in thought and teaching. I know how prone 
the heart is to send a benevolent hope after those 
who have gone without manifesting one bit of evi- 
dence that they possessed any of those qualities of 
character which Christ declares to be indispensable 
to a blessed beyond. Christ claimed to be the 
founder of the one permanent society of men ; that 
through him and through him alone men have ac- 
cess to the never-failing life and infinite freedom. 
Being the one he is Christ could not use words care- 
lessly. He assures men that he holds in his pierced 
hands the keys of heaven and hell ; that if he 
admits, words of exclusion pronounced by men are 
but idle breath ; that if he excludes, the approval 
and applause of the world will not prevail to give 
entrance to those mansions he has prepared. 

I must say that this is the hardest thing I find in 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 1 5 

his gospel. At times, I wish with all my weak and 
faltering heart that I had warrant to stand and say 
to the heedless spendthrifts of life as they near the 
icy stream, " Have no fear, it will end well at last, 
attest!" 

I turn to the tender words of the Laureate : 

O yet, we trust that somehow good 
Shall be the final end of ill, 

That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 

That not one life shall be destroyed 

Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete. 

I turn to Robert Browning, who, next to the 
Apostle Paul, has spoken most girdingly to me, to 
that most masterful of the creations of his masterful 
genius, the pope, in "The Ring and the Book." 
The pope is a man of towering faith, of genuine 
piety, a man of the highest sense of duty and jus- 
tice, so tempered with Christlike mercy that he is 
the soul of noble benevolence. He has passed sen- 
tence of death upon Guido, as arrant a scoundrel as 
ever drew breath. The pope hopes that Guido may 
be saved, and speaks thus : 

I stood at Naples once, a night so dark 

I could have scarce conjectured there was earth 

Anywhere, sky or sea, or world at all ; 

But the night's black was burst thro' by a blaze, 

Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groan'd and bore 

Thro' her whole length of mountains visible ; 

There lay the city, thick and plain with spires, 

And, like a ghost dis-shrouded white the sea. 



16 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

So may the truth be flasht out by one blow, 
And Guido see one instant, and be saved. 
Else I avert my face, nor follow him 
Into that sad, obscure, sequestered state 
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul 
He else made first in vain ; which must not be. 

The melodies of these great singers chime with 
the sympathies of the human heart. But when I 
turn from the words of Lord Tennyson and the 
great-souled Browning to the words of the Lord 
Jesus Christ, to him who is Truth, I find his words 
implacable and relentless as the law of God in the 
nature of things. In the presence of the words of 
Christ, who knew, sentiments of the poets, who 
did not know, are benevolent falsehood. It may be 
objected here that I minimize reason while I exalt 
revelation — that I place revelation above reason. 
Certainly. If revelation does not transcend reason, 
then it is not revelation. The brainiest man of his 
day and of any day exclaims : " Casting down 
reasonings and every high thing that is exalted 
against the knowledge of God, bring every thought 
into captivity to the obedience of Christ." 

Truth sometimes seems as hard as revenge. We 
know how terrible it is to see disease fasten its 
fatal fangs in our loved ones. Sometimes with the 
poet we have asked : 

Who shall read us the riddle of life ? 
The continual sequence of pain, 
The perpetual triumph of wrong, 
The whole creation in travail to make 
A victory for the strong. 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 17 

Moral consequences are unpitying. If it is wrong 
for God to let retribution follow sin in the world to 
come, then it is wrong if it follows sin in this world, 
even'for one single moment. There is not one law 
for this world and another for the next, and God be 
God. A benevolent falsehood may be, yea, often 
is, pleasanter than stern-featured truth. It may be 
a' delightful opiate to deaden the pain of truth. 
" But since things are what they are and the con- 
sequences will be what they will be, why should 
we desire to be deceived ? " We know the waking 
from opium is despair. If Christ is to be believed 
when he tells of the land of blessedness, must he 
not be believed when he tells of its opposite ? Be- 
ing the one he is, he could not speak truth in one 
place and not in another. " Be it not so," exclaims 
the apostle ; " yea, let God be found true but every 
man a liar." 

John Stuart Mill says : " There is no assurance 
whatever of a life after death on grounds of natural 
religion." Assurance here can rest alone on revela- 
tion. Human opinions do not reach beyond this 
life ' and without revelation there can be nothing 
more than conjecture. To cast a doubt then on the 
endlessness of punishment is to invalidate the cer- 
tainty of the endlessness of blessedness, since both 
rest on exactly the same revelation. 

Our Lord said : " A man's life consisteth not in 
the abundance of the- things he possesseth." It is 
not what a man has, but what he is; and he is what 
his heart makes him. Christ always represents 



1 8 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

character as greater than circumstances. While 
men do not always attain their goal in earthly 
things, Christ clearly teaches that in moral things 
they do. In the spiritual realm every man goes " to 
his own place," the place he himself has practically 
chosen. With immense insistence he appeals to 
men while on earth to " lay up treasures in heaven," 
to make for themselves " purses that wax not old," 
to become " rich toward God." 

I cannot think that Christ was dealing in pathetic 
fallacy when he drew those solemn and realistic 
pictures in the parable of the Virgins, the House- 
builder, and the Talents. I must think he is speak- 
ing eternal truth, even as the Father said unto him, 
in these parables. In each of them comes the in- 
evitable test : the fast-shut door and the outer dark- 
ness of carelessness; the down-rush of the flood and 
the reckoning with the Lord, in which we see the 
careless and the heedless left amid ruins of fool's 
hopes and all unsheltered in the pitiless storm ; the 
unfaithful and the slothful servant stripped of what 
he had and cast forth into the outer darkness of 
shame and despair. How implacable and irrepar- 
able it is ! One thing blazes through the gospel, 
and that is the relentless condemnation of moral 
uselessness. 

A bit ago I gave a picture from Robert Browning. 
But even with all his large, luminous gaze, his 
sight was not strong enough to pierce the mists 
that veil the gulf rolling between here and there. 
He says : 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 19 

I avert my face, nor follow him 

Into that sad, obscure, sequestered state. 

But Christ, whose gaze pierced through all myster- 
ies and fell upon all that lies beyond, he who is Truth, 
draws a vaster picture. It is the parable of the Rich 
Man and Lazarus. In the round world, for vivid 
luridness and ethical fatefulness, it is unmatched, 
yea, unapproached. The purpose of this paper 
demands that, at the risk of being thought weari- 
somely didactic, I dwell somewhat at length upon 
this scene. It is a picture of contrasts, and, if I 
may say so, done in two acts — one on earth, the 
other in the spirit world. The first scene presents 
a rich man dwelling in a palatial residence, clothed 
in costliest raiment of Tyrian purple, and, amid all 
the luxuries fabulous wealth could procure, he fares 
sumptuously every day. Thus sequestered within 
the delightful seclusion of his imposing gateway, 
which looked forbiddingly down on the beggary and 
wretchedness of the vulgar world without, this man 
lives his selfish and sensual life. His sympathies 
do not travel so far as the miserable but godly un- 
fortunate who is cast daily at his gate to beg that 
some of the shaken-out crumbs of the rich man's 
banquet may be given to him. The dogs are more 
pitying, seemingly, than he, for they indeed come 
to lick medicinally the poor man's sores. 

The picture is true to human life as we know it 
to-day, even after nineteen centuries of Christian 
teaching. It is a picture that never fades. It is the 
picture of human selfishness, and the fearful con- 



20 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

trast is with us still. It is a picture whereof the 
selfish rich would do well to learn the meaning — 
the extreme of wealth and the extreme of poverty : 
one with troops of friends, the other friendless ; the 
one clothed extravagantly, the other with rags that 
do not cover his sores ; the one gorged to satiety, 
the other gaunt and starving ; the one, rich in all his 
good things of this world, cares for nothing beyond ; 
the other, poor here, but, as his name signifies, rich 
toward God. Such is the earthly picture. But as 
to all things of earth, there cometh the end. The 
day dawns when Lazarus is borne not to the rich 
man's gate, but to his grave in potter's field'. The 
day too, when the rich epicurean leaves his sump- 
tuous feast untasted, and amid all the circumstance 
of funeral pomp is borne to his stately tomb. So 
far as human eyes can see, death, the great leveler, 
has ended this drama of painful contrasts. They 
surely are equals now. 

Then, with unfaltering hand, Christ lifts the veil ; 
there, in lights and shadows that never diminish, 
he discloses another scene of awful contrasts. In 
the interval of ringing down the curtain on the one 
and ringing it up on the other, life-lines have 
crossed. What an inversion ! The poor man is 
blessed, the rich man is the beggar now ; the one 
enfolded in Abraham's bosom enjoys the felicity of 
loftiest communion with the greatest conceivable 
nobility ; the other is beaten upon by the fires of a 
quenchless lust, his anguish is accentuated by in- 
describable regret, and he piteously begs for the 



1 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 21 

scorned common-place of his former life, a drop of 
water, to cool his tongue. But between the two 
rolls a gulf impassable. 

It is argued that this is a parable, and therefore 
not to be taken literally. Granted. But what are 
the parables of Christ ? They are thought forms 
upon which he hangs the drapery of eternal truth. 
After eliminating all that is figurative, the residuum 
must be the elemental, the unalterable truth, that 
character determines destiny. If not, Christ in- 
tended to deceive. Did he come to trifle with us 
and startle us with idle tales, as nurses scare chil- 
dren with stories of hobgoblins? No, he is the center 
and fountain of all truth, and what he says fits in 
with all we see in the world around us. 

Good and evil are in the world, happiness and 
misery, victory and defeat. His parables were 
spoken that we might not be deceived and act as 
if there was no difference between these opposites, 
or as if it matters little to which side we belong. 
It matters everything. It is the immeasurable differ- 
ence between eternal life and eternal death. His 
parables are beacon lights along the marge of an 
unseen, dangerous shore, flashing warningly there, 
that no life-craft shall come to remediless shipwreck. 
Christ spent his life in locating that spit of sand on 
which no moral house can abide. All his parables 
tell us the eternal, ethical truth that what we are 
here determines what we will be yonder ; that the 
good will be blessed, the evil will be condemned ; 
that heaven and hell are fixed realities, the nature 



22 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

of which our vain wishes cannot change, and the 
weal or woe of which lie alike beyond the sounding 
of finite thought. 

It is objected that this life is too brief to be pro- 
bative in relation to such incalculable consequences. 
Time can hardly be said to determine moral qual- 
ities. At every step life is a probation. The boy 
feels the probationary character of his youth, that 
his manhood will depend upon it. Let a man feel 
that there is nothing probationary about his to-day, 
and he will let it go as it will. He will say with 
another meaning : 

Leave time to dogs and apes, 
Man has forever. 

" Redeem the moment ! " exclaims the apostle. 

"Ex hoc momento pendit ceternitas," says the 
famous sun-dial. How exquisitely and yet how 
mightily Browning expresses the notion of probation 
when he makes Pippa say : 

Oh, Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee, 

A mite of my twelve hours' treasure, 
The least of thy gazes or glances, 

(Be they grants thou art bound to or gifts above measure), 
One of thy choices or one of thy chances, 

(Be they tasks God imposed thee, or freaks at thy pleasure), 

My Day, if I squander such labor or leisure, 
Then shame fall on Asolo, mischief on me ! 

" Brethren, the time is short." And when I hear 
that mightiest of all sentences that concluded the 
mightiest work our humanity knows, "It is fin- 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 23 

ished ! " I know this life does conclude something. 
If not, why, why, at such fearful cost did Christ 
come ? We must ask, if there is so vast opportun- 
ity in the future, what can be the meaning of 
Christ's coming at all ? " It is finished ! " What 
mean those immense words but that in three brief 
years the most significant probation was concluded? 

When Dives refused his duties to humanity, shut 
himself up to selfish gratification, mocked mercy in 
his heart, he scorned that law of God in his soul of 
which the law and the prophets were but so many 
attempted utterances ; he passed sentence upon 
himself and sealed his own doom. He deliber- 
ately chose to go on that way which placed an im- 
passable gulf between him and the Good Samaritan. 
Whatever and wherever heaven may be, no one is 
cast out but him who casts himself out. 

But is this destiny ? Is it final ? May there not 
be a final restoration after the penal fires have done 
their work of purification ? I can simply say that 
Christ has no word upon which to base the Larger 
Hope. He who is the "resurrection and the life '' 
nowhere speaks one word or gives one hint that 
the judgment is not final. There is a great "gulf 
fixed " that none may cross. If finality is not ex- 
pressed in that, where can we find it ? 

Death is not the mere transference from one 
world to another, but a transference from probation 
to judgment. When all the conditions of probation 
are removed by death, it is difficult to see how it 
can continue. Christ clearly and emphatically 



24 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

teaches that death does not change character, that 
character determines destiny, and that destiny once 
determined is unalterable and eternal. The con- 
clusion of all his teaching and suffering was that 
every man goes to his own place, but that every 
man by virtue of his intervention has the choosing 
of his place. His parables, his deeply earnest ap- 
peals to men to choose him, his terrible sacrifices, his 
unutterable agony, his awful death, all point in one 
direction. All are like flaming red lights stretching 
along the brink of that fearful abyss to warn his 
brother man back from life's last fatal mistake. 

It is not the purpose of this paper to quote ex- 
haustively here. The thought does not rest upon a 
parable or so, nor upon the meaning of a word, but 
upon the very life of Christ himself. It underlies 
the Gospels and sounds from the profoundest depths 
of moral being as an ethical necessity. I hold up 
the Christ, there amid the pangs of the cross, and I 
ask, why that, if this life is not critical, so critical 
that it must conclude something from which Christ 
felt it incumbent upon him to suffer unspeakably to 
save us ? '■ " Since things are what they are and the 
consequences of them will be what they will be, 
why should we desire to be deceived ? " 

In conclusion, consider : 

It is quite as difficult to conceive 
4. That a thing may f a state f eternal happiness as 

he inconceivable is no Qf a ^^ Qf etema j ^ Wg 
argument against . , , , .,' 

its existence cannot judge of a goal until the 
goal is reached. An existence of 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 25 

which we have had no experience must remain in- 
conceivable. The categories of time and space are 
so inseparable from our modes of thinking, so in- 
wrought in our experience in the present state, that 
we cannot conceive of a conscious existence where 
these do not prevail. 

The most we can do is to construct heaven and 
hell out of fragments of finite experiences, and finite 
terms must ever be the vehicle by which we trans- 
late the infinite — a vehicle totally inadequate. In 
vain the finite tries to interpret infinite weal or woe. 
Thought wearies and swoons in that thin, far air 
and falls, exclaiming, " Alas, we do not know ! " 

It is just here where we are prone to make the 
mistake of trying to utter what Christ left silent, to 
describe what he never revealed. What Christ 
left covered with the veil of mystery, it is safe and 
sane for us to leave to him. To those curious about 
things the angels desire to look into, Christ says : 
" What is that to thee ? Follow thou me." What 
God will do we do not know. What he does now 
is perfectly plain. "He commandeth men every- 
where to repent." 

Flashing rhetoric and sentimental oratory about 
the unwearying benevolence of God that will pur- 
sue the sinner through immeasurable cycles of puri- 
fying discipline till at last he is brought home, are 
no doubt very captivating; but after all they are 
nothing more than human speculations that cannot 
change the nature of things. One thing is sure : 
God cannot invade and force a will and yet leave 



26 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

it free. There can be no self-surrender of a being 
whom God has placed under the compulsion of ne- 
cessity. A forced will can never be a free will. 
Our friends, the final restorationists, are better at 
rhetoric than at thinking. If God at last merges by 
might all wills into his own, that is a pantheism 
which means the spiritual suffocation of every per- 
sonality. As I turn away from the morally unfet- 
tered words of the preachers of the Larger Hope, I 
am compelled to say, that any line of religious in- 
struction which takes for its leading principle the 
notion that the dominant aim of divine revelation is 
to give to the generality of defiant men a cheerful 
and hopeful view of their ultimate destiny, differs 
toto ccelo from the awful doctrine taught by Christ 
and his apostles. It seems to me, if we investigate 
as a historical question what Christ taught, unbiased 
by our natural liking to think that he taught the 
things we wish to believe to be true, we find no 
ground to assert that Christ or his apostles taught 
anything to strengthen the hope of universal resto- 
ration that natural religion or sentimental feeling 
may have led us to form. There are some problems 
we cannot solve. How the existence of evil can be 
reconciled with an omnipotent, all-good God, is a 
problem for which the human mind can find no solu- 
tion. Stepping aside from the revelation given us 
in the Gospels, we are back again in the moral twi- 
light of paganism. We lose all explanation why 
God should have made us exposed to temptation in 
this life, if we think it possible that hereafter he 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 27 

can, without annihilating virtue as well as vice, or- 
dain a constitution of things in which inducements 
to well-doing shall be so overpowering that wrong- 
doing shall be impossible. As no one may dare 
limit the mercy of God, so no one can tell to what 
awful depths the wickedness of man may reach, or 
what irremediableness may cling to it in the way of 
natural consequence. In its own character wicked- 
ness possesses no element of cure, nor even of ex- 
haustion. It grows by what it feeds on. It may 
make a hell on earth, and that, therefore, it may 
make a hell in the future, everlasting as itself, he 
must be a rash man who would deny. The solemn 
facts of the present life are against him. We know 
the hardening effects of sin here. To assert in the 
face of Scripture and experience that all men will 
be saved, is to make an unwarrantable assertion. 

But if the holders of the Larger Hope have dogma- 
tized where they have no warrant, their opponents 
have not been behind them upon the other side. 
Lurid and terrible descriptions of the future state 
have been dogmatically given. This from Emmons 
is a good sample : " The happiness of the elect in 
heaven will, in part, consist in witnessing the tor- 
ments of the damned in hell." Emmons stated 
what he did not know. 

As a matter of fact the day of preaching the pun- 
ishment by literal fire has gone by, because it is 
unwarranted by Scripture. None of us like that 
method which is cited from Emmons. That does 
not, however, invalidate the tremendous doctrine 



28 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

which we keep in the background because we follow 
the methods of the New Testament writers. They 
do not teach that the wicked shall cease to exist, 
nor do they teach that they who reject the means 
of grace which God has provided for their restoration 
to virtue and happiness in this life, may rely on 
some means provided hereafter, which they cannot 
resist. 

- Christ did little more than assert the fact of the 
existence of heaven and hell. I am content to let 
alone what he left undescribed. He gives warrant 
to no one to dogmatize here. He has authorized no 
man to be a judge here. I cannot know what may 
be between. Christ and another soul. I do not 
know what is the degree of faith he accepts. I only 
know he will not do wrong. 

The thoughtful reader of the New Testament 
must be impressed with the astonishing greatness 
of Christ as he walks through its pages. On one 
side he comes close and touches men in most in- 
timate human familiarity. The very children draw 
near to the Man on friendliest terms. On the other 
side he is mysteriously joined to the heart and 
power of God. Yonder, by the lake shore, we see 
him coming into sympathy with the homely hunger 
of the multitude, but the next instant the loaf of 
bread in his hands becomes a manifestation of his 
inscrutable power. No soul came near him that it 
did not at once hear the voice of a brother, and yet 
a voice blending at once with that of divine wis- 
dom. So again in this story, which called forth 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 29 

those deep words in which he claims honor equal 
with the Father, we behold him coming to that 
poor cripple there, by the pool of Bethesda — how 
humanly his sympathy goes out to the poor unfor- 
tunate — then instantly commanding, " Arise, take 
up thy bed and walk ! " thus attesting his might of 
Lordship. Along with that tenderest human sym- 
pathy there was also the blazing out of awful judg- 
ment. While we cannot separate his humanity 
from his divinity, neither can we be blind to the judi- 
cial side of his character. What insight into pre- 
tensions ! What unerring exposure of motives ! 
What laying bare of disguises ! He is not benev- 
olence only. He is Judge. "Neither doth the 
Father judge any man, but he hath given all judg- 
ment unto the Son ; that all may honour the Son, 
even as they honour the Father." 

It is not morally wise to trifle with his word. It 
is not quantity, but quality of life, that holds be- 
fore the bar of heaven. He was gone before mid- 
life ; three years, at most, achieved the work of 
which two thousand years only suffice to begin to 
show the wondrousness. The poor villages of Gal- 
ilee and the precincts of Jerusalem bounded his 
steps, and yet before him the front ranks of all 
mankind, for sixty generations, have bent the knee 
and listened to his word as the ultimate truth of 
God. He is judge, because he is the manifestation 
of the one and only morality which is in God. 

Men seem to have wrong notions about punish- 
ment, as though God arbitrarily inflicted it. Dr r 



30 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST 

E. G. Robinson well says: "Deity need not send 
a policeman after the sinner, the sinner carries the 
policeman inside." There is a kind of moral Sinai 
in every one of us, and we can no more sheathe its 
lightnings and hush its thunders than we can still 
the sea or suppress the tempest. Christ did not 
come to destroy the moral law. He came to fulfill ; 
and these laws are absolute, inflexible, irrever- 
sible, as the moral being of God ; they are the 
steady friends of those who obey, the eternal ene- 
mies of those who transgress them. Christ was 
the perfect life. He is eternal life, and he comes 
to call men unto himself that he may give them 
this life, which is eternal, because it is based in 
the eternal, constitutive being of God. There he 
stands, calling to us : " Come to me, learn of me, 
be like me!" 

I hold up to all comers the historic Christ, the 
insoluble problem of the ages ; I plant my faith 
upon him. He is Lord. His word is my law ; he 
is my God. No sophistry beneath the stars can 
compel within me the belief that John and Herod, 
Peter and Judas, Paul and Nero, belong in the same 
place. Without the life of Christ in the human soul 
there can be a hell. For when I am tempted to dis- 
believe in him, I know that anguish hotter than 
material fire which fills the soul. It is what at times 
all have felt ; it is what Goethe felt in the flaming 
agonies of Faust ; Byron, in the wild delirium of 
Manfred ; Shakespeare, in the midnight despair of 
Macbeth. 



CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE 3 1 

O Christ, without thee there is never-ending 
restlessness, for which this world has no sedative. 
Thou, and thou alone, canst slay the evil and con- 
quer the fever of the soul. 

"Neither is there salvation in any other; for 
there is none other name under heaven given 
among men whereby we must be saved." 



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